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Around the World in Aircraft
In the early 1920s the world’s leading aviation nation was Great Britain. It had an independent air force, commercial airlines and a booming aircraft manufacturing industry. By contrast, the United States, where the heavier-than-air aircraft first flew was nearly dead last. Its aviation industry consisted of barnstormers, stunt pilots flying war surplus biplanes. It had no airlines, few developed airfields, and most manufacturers were fighting bankruptcy. Americans were indifferent to aviation.
Into Unknown Skies: An Unlikely Team, a Daring Race, and the First Flight Around the World, by David K. Randall, shows how an unofficial air race around the world changed American attitudes, leading to eventual US preeminence in aviation.
By 1923 many aviation firsts had been accomplished. The Atlantic had been crossed; there had been flights across the North American continent, and from England to India. But no one had circumnavigated the globe in an airplane. Great Britain and France tried and failed.
The US Army Air Service wanted to rekindle American interest in aviation. Its cheif, Major General Mason Patrick, decided an Air Service team would make that first with an around-the-world flight in 1924. His plan differed from previous attempts. Instead of a single aircraft he planned to send four, allowing the mission to be accomplished despite losses incurred along the way.
He also planned flying west, not east as previous attempts had done. This put the hardest part of the flight – crossing the Pacific – at the beginning. It also gave the US an opportunity to achieve another aviation first. Even if the aircraft failed to circumnavigate the globe, they would have made the first flight across the Pacific.
The announcement triggered a spate of rival attempts. Britain would not allow the upstart Yanks to upstage them. They started their own circumnavigation attempt. French, Portuguese, Argentinian and Italian aviators soon followed. The race was on.
Randall follows the various teams in each of their tries. He switches focus between the American team, flying four Douglas World Cruisers as they followed the sun around the world and the British contestant, Archibald Stuart-MacLaren, and his three-man aircraft going east. These were the most serious contenders. Randall weaves in the flights of the other nations, generally done by a single pilot on a logistical shoestring.
Into Unknown Skies is a fascinating book, one highlighting a forgotten accomplishment of early aviation history. Randall shows the human face of a remarkable achievement.
“Into Unknown Skies: An Unlikely Team, a Daring Race, and the First Flight Around the World,” by David K. Randall, Mariner Books, September, 2024, 304 pages, $32.99 (Hardcover), 15.99 (E-book), $24.29 (Audiobook), $45.95 (Audio CD)
This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.
Published in History
A tiny quibble (a quibblette?): Emergent technologies are attended by a cloud of manufacturers, assemblers, brokers, charlatans, and assorted riffraff. The automotive industry produced them 20 or so years before. “Companies” consisted of a hobbyist/dreamer, a barn, a collection of components, and a creditor or two. They would pop up, sputter along for a while, then peter out, go bankrupt, or get acquired. The exact same thing happened in the personal computer boom. (Remember when Computer Shopper Magazine was over two inches thick? Remember Computer Shopper Magazine?) Churn doesn’t indicate a lack of interest, rather the opposite.
It sounds like an excellent book, Seawriter. Stop doing that. The pile is getting too big.
Was there a comparable race to achieve, not the greatest distance, but the greatest altitude? And not only that, carry to such heights enough usable equipment (e.g., telescopes, and the personnel to peer through them intelligently, and the flight stability to make such peering practical, and the radiotelegraphic machinery to send information back home) to make reconnaissance better than ever before? I think the earliest military hope for aircraft, lighter-than-air as well as fixed-wing, was to see things.
Hurt them later. But right now, just see ’em.
Yes. We landed on the moon first.
Yes. I had a subscription.
It wasn’t until I visited an excellent display at the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas a few months ago that I really came to appreciate how rapidly airplane technology developed from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s. Monumental developments were occurring every few months. Such a few years from barely able to fly a couple hundred miles to circumnavigating the globe. I thought today’s technology development was fast. But a person who was anywhere near aviation in those days would have been near head-spinning technology development.